A Fine Show

Tony Demes is back with Noisette.

Chef Tony Demes’ new French-modern restaurant Noisette is
good for both dinner and a show if you do it right. Couvron, his
much-missed previous restaurant—which Demes moved from Portland to New
York in the early aughts—was well known for its four-hour, many-course
tasting menus, and Demes has carried this tradition into the new
venture. While the oh-so-petite dishes are available à la carte
($9-$18), the true heart of the place is still in the full $75,
eight-course, ever-changing tasting menu, an enveloping two- or
three-hour experience dedicated to the notion that dining can be a full
evening’s entertainment in its own right, not just a decadent prelude to
later spectacles.

The
small dishes are presented with obvious care and maybe a little
showmanship: the oversize plates, tight culinary geometries and swirls
of reduction native to the much-parodied nouvelle cuisine are often in
evidence here. The servers orient each beautifully plated dish to the
diner with terrific precision, as if framing a portrait over a settee.
But a single glance at the kitchen will let you know this is a place of
tradition as much as innovation or glitz. The main tools in use are the
pot, pan and knife, not the freeze dryer or sous vide cooker.

Each dish is both
simple and complex at once, a matter of four or five distinct notes
brought into harmony. You find yourself comparing one rich bite to the
next, wondering, do you prefer the tarragonned and hazelnutted lobster
($13) with the tightly cubed beet and pear together, or merely with the
pear? (Answer: You prefer it with just the pear.)

There were no
missteps in the 10 courses I tried, though there were standouts—in
particular, a petite filet of tender white sturgeon ($14) atop a bed of
creamy potato purée against red wine reduction, with shallot and
bittersweet fennel on top. The potato “sauces,” which were used twice
during the meal, were a truly delicate notion; it is a hard thing to
make potato interesting when it’s allowed to be only itself. But this
potentially familiar combination of tastes was in its own way renewed. A
well-executed short rib and New York strip ($15), both very French in
their saucing, were brought up against crisped, wilted tendrils of pea
to similar effect.

Among the appetizers,
Demes served up a celery root “hummus” ($9) that in texture was more
like whipped custard, to be eaten using a turbined wheel of small
unsalted potato chips ensconced in the hummus; the celery was frothy and
gentle in its flavor, like whipped air tinged with lightly bitter
memory.

As
soon as one dish was savored and discussed and settled, another was
brought. The pacing was on point throughout, as indeed meals were always
served from the left and taken from the right, each ingredient
explained, the water filled, the hand towels in the bathroom made of
cloth and not paper. If you’re trying to make eating an experience, the
details count. So while there was no real pomp or formality—wear what
you want—the formalities were so well attended to that they dropped from
view.

In a town that
rightfully prides itself on its whimsically homegrown fresh-local-casual
approach to dining—we have achieved in only 15 years something of a
genuine regional cuisine—Noisette manages to be both appropriate to the
city and something that we nonetheless mostly lack, which is true
high-end traditional fine dining. I’m happier than anyone that we have
more haute hamburgers per capita than anywhere in the nation, but
sometimes the smug comfort-foodieism is just a mask for entitled
middlebrow taste gone haywire in its priorities. Noisette is a nice
little tug on the proverbial scales.

Order this: Spring for the full tasting menu; even if you skimp on the wine you’ll still leave feeling somehow drunk and rosy.

Best deal: And yet, you can also approximate the experience for half price by ordering a scattering of six plates and sharing.

I’ll pass: If somehow there’s something you don’t like, take it home with you; give the paper your address and I’ll pick it up.